Two academics put out an online call for material. In one week, they had a book’s worth.
Hacking the Academy, an edited volume about academe in the digital age, was compiled from blog posts and Twitter messages posted during a single week. The project was organized by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, as an experiment meant to challenge the conventional university-press system.
They asked for submissions via Twitter by posting a message with a link and the tag #hackacad.
By the end of the week, the project had received 329 submissions from 180 authors, with responses including text, video, and art.
Contributors were encouraged to post their submissions on their personal blogs, allowing anyone following the project’s tag to keep track of incoming content. As a result, many submissions reference other pieces within the volume.
“There’s a lot of crosstalk,” says Mr. Scheinfeldt. “That’s a different narrative format than ‘I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about.’”
In addition to the original submissions, the two organizers plan on including some blog comments in the print version of the book. “You end up with something that is more conversational” than a typical monograph, says Mr. Cohen. “Why does it have to be one author, one chapter?”
Topics covered in Hacking the Academy include academic employment, scholarly conferences, and educational technology. Each chapter includes several blog posts written by scholars.
Of the 329 submissions, 90 were created specifically in response to the project. Others were revisions of existing pieces.
The organizers announced their call for submissions at THATCamp, a digital humanities unconference hosted by the Center for History and New Media.
The book is scheduled for release by the end of 2010 from Digital Culture Books, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and University of Michigan Library.
10 Responses to Scholars Compile Academic Book From Twitter and Blogs
11159995 - June 2, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Was it peer reviewed? With this kind of disparate content, that must have been a challenge!—Sandy Thatcher
arrive2__net - June 2, 2010 at 4:40 pm
It is believable that some blog and microblog entries could be worth organizing and recording in a long term, book, form. Technically, it seems like the book will be trying to provide a quality and edited set of blog entries that, in a sense, will compete with ongoing, original online blogs for reader’s time. I wonder how this idea might work as an ongoing ‘best of the blogs’ website. This book has already received this pre-publication publicity from the Chronicle, so it will be interesting to see if it “goes viral” … I mean … becomes a best seller. Bernard SchusterArrive2.net
mbsss - June 2, 2010 at 5:08 pm
George Mason’s work with Zotera has already created an opportunity for some interesting exchange between scholars which allow for greater than ever access and storage of information and analysis. All of this is very “cool” and some of it extremely helpful for organization’s sake–and even for opening up doors to individuals who might ordinarily not be able to participate in academic dialogue as easily as they can now. A broader acceptance of qualitative theory from literature has spread nicely into the social sciences, business, and media over the last 30 years also–and the result—wonderful conversations and appreciation for the narrative. BUT, let’s not forget to be sufficiently self-critical and remember to ask ourselves and our peers what is necessary, relevant, important, and truly a contribution–not only to knowledge but to the tax payers and/or shareholders who pay for the desks and chairs we occupy. (as kids we used to celebrate unbirthdays, so I look forward to seeing the result of this digital dialogue in print). Cheers.
shermandorn - June 2, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Sandy Thatcher @1: I hope you’re being deliberately ironic! I suspect a generous proportion of edited collections in the humanities have two characteristics: the editors conduct all of the reviewing, and they generally have slim pickings after a 6-month window from a CFP. In this case, Cohen and Scheinfeldt will have more than 300 selections from which to select what is in the printed volume. Even innovative university presses such as Penn State (which collaborates with the PSU library in the Metalmark Imprint) have to be very skeptical of any edited project volume, but less because of quality than because edited collections just don’t sell many copies. Given the coverage of the project this week and the availability of the submitted drafts, I suspect the printed volume will sell far more copies than your typical edited collection. But hold me to my prediction: let’s see what happens!
11159995 - June 3, 2010 at 11:29 am
I wasn’t being ironic, actually. If the book is being published by a university press, it should be peer reviewed and formally approved by a faculty editorial board that serves the press. Yes, the editors do the initial selecting of articles (or, in this case, blog entries), but any university press that is truly such must conduct a formal peer-review process by having experts evaluate the final manuscript and the editorial board sign off on the project on the basis of these readers’ reports. Or is Michigan going to be experimenting here with some new form of post-publication peer review (although it seems, in a way, that this project involves pre-submission peer review, too)?Please note that the Metalmark series involves online republication of books about Pennsylvania that are in the public domain. Although there is a committee involved in selecting the books for this series, it is not a formal peer-review process and it is conducted by the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, not all of whose projects are published under the Press’s own imprint. It is closer to a distribution arrangement than a normal publication.The assumption that “edited collections just don’t sell many copies,” though widely held even by many university press editors, is not true for all fields, or all subjects within fields. An analysis I did last year of sales in Latin American studies of books published by Penn State over a 20-year period showed there to be no significant difference in the average or median sale of regular books and edited volumes. Some edited volumes have been among the Press’s best sellers in this and other fields.—Sandy Thatcher
shermandorn - June 4, 2010 at 6:32 am
I stand corrected on the sales of edited collections and gladly so (though I’ll stick with my prediction about sales for the volume). But I think the assumption that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with peer review is precisely one of the issues the volume is addressing in substance, and the reflexive question about peer review above has prompted the written equivalent of eye-rolling among some contributors to the volume. A legitimate question to ask is what university presses could do to maintain their facial legitimacy if they do away with prepublication peer review. That’s an important issue of campus politics because of questions about what makes university presses unique contributors and worthy of university resources (okay, the slim pickings that exist today). Right now, that’s because of peer review. But it’s a question university presses need to be asking, because I don’t think prepublication will have the same automatic acceptance in 10 years that it does today.
shermandorn - June 4, 2010 at 6:38 am
Erratum… the last line should read “I don’t think prepublication review will have the same automatic acceptance in 10 years that it does today.”
amandafrench - June 4, 2010 at 10:38 am
I don’t actually know whether Hacking the Academy will be peer-reviewed, but I have to say that I can’t think of any reason it ought to be. (Disclosure: I submitted a piece.) Editorial selection by Messrs. Cohen and Scheinfeldt, reputable and credentialed scholars both, seems more than sufficient to me to ensure the quality of the material. Especially since many of the submissions are opinion pieces, I think, more like scholarly journalism than scholarship.
ibogost - June 4, 2010 at 5:45 pm
This article is inaccurate and should be corrected. The materials in the collection were not compiled from blog posts and related materials posted within a single week. A great many of them (including a piece of mine which was nominated to be included) were written long before the concept for the collection was announced.I say this not to support or detract from the project itself (the idea was to assemble a book in a week, not to write one from whole cloth), but because the story as it is reported is not telling the whole story. On the subject of peer review, I don’t know what the editors’ intentions are, but nowhere does the project claim to be published by a university press…rather it was conceived of and carried out by a university research center.
danielcohen - June 7, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Correcting ibogost’s corrections: Hacking the Academy will indeed be published by a university press: the University of Michigan. 90 articles were written specifically for the volume in the week we were accepting submissions, with another 240 submitted from prior work (some edited or expanded, many in their original form). The print edition will consist of the best pieces, subject to review.This may be an “abnormal publication” according to Sandy Thatcher, but the use of the phrase “normal publication” by the head of a university press should indicate to Chronicle readers a certain aversion to experimentation and a conservatism that Hacking the Academy intends to challenge.